Sep 14 Gone at 21

We highlight this podcast with multiple caveats. It is independent, raw, unpolished. Our first listen was excruciating as we waited for a standard true crime narrative framework to fall into place - which never came. But as a loose, rambling investigation, it is weirdly compelling, like tipping head-first into a private detective's coffee-stained case files, as well as into a certain vision of drug-addicted small-town America. Host J. Ryan Green is, literally, a P.I., hired to investigate the death of Katelyn Markham, who disappeared in 2011 and whose body was found two years later. In the process, he interviews the people who knew her; examines the evidence in deadpan detail; and skirts, perhaps unwittingly, the larger context of the opium crisis. We suspect it won't end with concrete answers (we're halfway through, with last Saturday's final episode on the horizon). But for true-crime-heads, this is unusual fodder.